Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us … a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam … the only home we’ve ever known.
—Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot (1994)
Drill, baby, drill!
—Michael Steele, 2008 Republican National Convention
Photographed from 18,000 miles in 1972, Earth had the look
of a marble, or so people said. Eighteen years later, we shot it again,
this time from 3.7 billion miles when Voyager 1, still traveling at
40,000 miles per hour, was nearly done with this solar system that
occupies a tiny bit of real estate in the known universe. A dot
is what we called it then, pale and blue. A pinprick that’s
difficult to make out against its black backdrop of void. Here
we are, on that dot, waving goodbye to Voyager 1. And that’s
that, I suppose. Now, 28 years later and five miles from home,
huge earth movers are clawing at the ground at a site that’s
being prepped. When we ask what for, no one can tell us.
The sound of the heavy machinery has already become a
curtain of ambient noise dropped over our days. When a mote
of some black substance swirls in the light-gray glass of
water I pour from the sink, I shrug. The porch is covered in dust.
I drive my car by the grace of plants and animals suspended
in the Earth’s crust for a hundred million years, cooked in
a sort of clay pot by pressure and heat. But that’s about to be a
chapter of the past. Fifty or sixty years at most. By then a sunbeam
will power our cars and hoverbikes. Or simply fall on our ashes. The
thing about the universe is that it seems infinite, but really it’s only
a ceaseless series of extinctions. I think about that on the drive home.
Over five billion species have been here. 99.9 percent are gone. We’ve
been here about an hour on Sagan’s Cosmic Calendar. Have you ever
thought about that? Last week a guy at the bar said, I ain’t known
about none of that. All I know’s we’ll have plenty of oil if we just drill
down deep enough. Today two friends showed me their new baby.
They were happy, as if they expect a world for her. This is not a drill.
See more poems from Issue 17.2 by purchasing a copy in our online store. Digital copies only $5.
